by Lucy Monroe
“Whereas my drink is made up of three easy-to-come-by, not so expensive ingredients. I rest my case…High-maintenance, thy name is Spiros.”
Warmth went through him, and some of the tension he’d been feeling drained away. “It is good to have you teasing me again, byba.”
“I haven’t felt much like joking about anything lately.”
This he had noticed. “I am sorry for that.”
“I’m relieved Dimitri backed out.” She looked down, no longer willing to meet his eyes. “I know Papa and Mama are very upset, but I’m glad. I am not a good daughter.”
He could not believe what he was hearing. “You are a very good daughter. You were willing to marry a man you believed would make you miserable in order to maintain their livelihood and lifestyle.”
“I wouldn’t have been miserable. I just wouldn’t have been happy,” she said in a low voice.
And suddenly the thought of her less than perfectly happy was too much for him to bear. “Thankfully, you face neither fate.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“We have been friends for years, and other than the last two weeks we have always gotten along.”
“We fight.”
“Yes, but we also make up. It would not be good to marry someone with whom you were not comfortable disagreeing.” The truth was, he was more comfortable with her on every level than with any other woman he had ever known—more than any person, even his brother and grandfather.
“That’s true.” She was looking at him again, studying him like she was trying to see something.
“What?” he asked.
“There’s more to marriage than being compatible as friends.”
“It’s a start.”
“Yes, but for it to work for us there has to be more.”
“What more exactly are you talking about, Phoebe?”
“Sexual compatibility.”
He choked on his whiskey, and nearly dropped the heavy crystal glass. “What?” he gasped out between wheezing breaths, while the alcohol burned his throat in a way it had not since his first drink.
“I want to test our sexual compatibility.”
Impossible. He had not heard those words out of his byba’s lips. “You did not say this to me.”
“I did.”
“No. I did not hear it.”
“Stop being stubborn. You heard me.”
“You want to test our sexual compatibility?”
“Yes.”
She was serious. After what had happened in her student apartment, how could she doubt their compatibility in this way?
This was ridiculous.
“No way. I won’t do it.”
She put her drink down and stood, that expression of determination back. “That’s unfortunate, because I won’t marry you if I’m not sure we can satisfy one another in the bedroom. You’ll have to find another way to redeem your family’s honor.”
She turned to leave, and he was so shocked by her words that he let her get all the way to the door before he barked out an order for her to stop.
She faced him and waited by the door.
“You can’t be serious, Phoebe.”
“I am.” And, damn it, she looked it.
“Surely after that kiss in your apartment you cannot doubt we share a suitable rapport?” Damn it. He sounded like a politician, not a man hot to share her bed. And he was. Very hot.
She winced, and he figured she agreed. “That was very one-sided.”
“I was more turned on than I have ever been,” he admitted, refusing to hide behind euphemisms any longer.
“Yet you found it so easy to dismiss the encounter as meaningless.”
“You were promised to my brother.”
“So you pretended something profound had meant nothing?”
“Yes.” If she wanted the truth, he would give it to her.
“You lied to me?”
“Yes.” And he was not proud of that fact.
“Your lie hurt me.”
“I am sorry.”
She shrugged, as if his apology meant nothing, and that stung.
“You do not believe I am sincere?”
“I believe you put more importance on family honor than on not hurting people who are supposed to matter to you. You hurt me. You hurt Dimitri. If you had been Dimitri you would have married me and left the mother of your child in the cold.”
“I would not have gotten another woman pregnant,” he said through gritted teeth.
Phoebe looked at him for several seconds of silence. “I believe you.”
“Then believe me when I say that we are in perfect accord physically.” He was still reeling from her accusations of hurting the people he cared about, but he could not allow himself to get sidetracked from their initial discussion.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean that this is not a negotiable point.”
“It should not be a point at all. You already know the answer—there is no need for further testing.”
“So you say.”
“Yes.” And his word should be good enough. Besides, she had been there. The true surprise was that she had believed his denial of how powerful it had been.
But she had believed, and she had been hurt—and there was only one way to make up for that. If she would let him.
“How can I know you are telling me the truth now?” she asked, proving her mind was traveling along the same path.
Only she had a different destination in mind.
“Because I am.”
“Not good enough. You lied to me once, according to you…and you could do it again. And I wouldn’t find out until it was too late to rectify the problem with anything but a divorce. Mama is upset enough about the current scandal. That would unhinge her completely.”
“There will be no divorce,” he bit out. How could she even suggest a thing?
“That is my hope as well. But if there is not love between us at least we need to know we are a good match sexually. We can build on that.”
“You love me. You said so.” Okay, she’d stopped herself from saying it completely, but he knew that was what she’d meant.
She flinched, but then she shrugged. “My feelings, or lack thereof, are not up for discussion right now.”
“Phoebe, I have always loved you.”
She looked both sad and happy at that. “I know. As a very dear friend—probably the most dear friend in your life. But you still turned me away when I needed you most. You aren’t in love with me, but if you truly want me I think we can make a marriage work.”
The fact she believed he had abandoned her when she had needed him most was a shard of pain lodged deep inside him. “I was trying to protect you.”
“It didn’t work.”
“Of that I am aware. I knew I’d made a mistake after you had gone. You would not talk about it later, though.”
“There was nothing to discuss any longer. I was engaged to your brother.”
“Yes.”
“Regardless of why, you did not want to marry me. Now you do. For reasons I find personally hard to trust. I need other assurances.”
“You are saying if I make love to you, you will marry me?”
“I am saying that if we make love and it is good it will help me make a choice in your favor.”
“But surely you know…sometimes these things take more than one effort to establish.”
“You mean our sexual compatibility?”
“Yes.” What else had they been discussing these past ten minutes?
She cocked her head to one side. “Do you doubt your ability to please me?”
“Of course not.” He’d given her so much pleasure with a kiss that she had blacked out.
“Then it’s my ability to satisfy you that you doubt. To be honest, that has me worried too. Which is why I’m here.”
“That’s not what I meant, either.”
She looked at him like
he’d lost some of his marbles in the last few minutes. Hell, maybe he had. “There are only two options.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t always go smoothly the first time. I don’t want you turned off from sex and thinking you don’t want to get married because the loss of your virginity is painful.”
“So it is your performance that has you concerned?”
“No, damn it.”
“Prove it.”
“This is ridiculous,” he felt compelled to say, though his resistance to the idea had dwindled to almost nothing.
“No more so than a twenty-first-century father selling his daughter to save his company.”
“I am not buying you!”
“What would you call it?”
“Marriage. Families supporting one another.”
“But you wouldn’t give the kind of support outlined in the contracts you brought to the house if you didn’t marry me.”
“I would if you asked me to.”
She stared at him, her expression stunned. “You mean that?”
“Of course.”
“But my father would not accept without our marriage.”
“I think he would.”
“Then why didn’t you just offer the money?”
“Because I want to marry you.”
“Why?”
“I need you in my life. If nothing else, I have learned that lesson over the past weeks.”
“Okay.”
“So you will marry me?” he asked with cautious optimism.
“I meant okay I believe you. But I still want to make sure we’ve got both sex and friendship going for us. Is that really so much to ask?”
He looked down into her beautiful but troubled dark eyes and shook his head. No, it was not too much to ask. She had been through so much in a short period of time, and she was feeling very out of control. In essence, she was simply trying to take some of that control back.
And, like every time but one when she had come to him for help, he could do nothing but assure she was given what she needed.
The truth was, if he’d helped that one time as well, none of the subsequent public scandal would have been caused. Dimitri’s girlfriend would not have gone missing and his grandfather would have had his surgery under less life-or-death circumstances.
He wasn’t going to screw up that way again.
“Come here, Phoebe.”
Phoebe couldn’t believe he was going to make love to her. But she could see from the serious expression in his golden brown eyes that was exactly what he had planned. Coming here tonight had not been a mistake.
Spiros understood, even if he did not agree. And he’d told her he wanted to marry her irrespective of the money deal between their families. Even if it was only because he’d realized how important their friendship was to him, that was still good to know.
His eyes burned over her with the same flame of desire she’d seen that night in her apartment. They were going to make love. She was so keyed-up by the prospect she could barely breathe.
Her body drawn by a relentless invisible cord, she moved toward him.
He reached out when she was close enough and pulled her the rest of the way, his mouth coming down toward hers even as their bodies came together.
“Never doubt that I want you.” He spoke against her lips in a low but firm voice.
“Show me,” she challenged.
“Oh, I will.”
Then he kissed her. The caress against her lips did not last long, but it touched her to the very marrow of her being.
“Your mouth is perfect, so kissable,” he murmured against the very lips he was praising.
“I couldn’t imagine doing this with Dimitri.”
“You are not to try to imagine doing anything with him ever again.”
She almost laughed at the possessive growl, but had a feeling he would not share her amusement. “You were the one who told me I had to marry him. That you wanted me to.”
“I believed it was the only way.”
“And now you think the only way for your family’s pride to be salvaged is to marry me yourself?” There was no bitterness in her voice, only awe at his unswerving sense of right.
She had known her whole life she could count on Spiros, and he only bolstered that fact with his actions. What she had not realized before was that her ability to trust his integrity implicitly superseded her ability to trust him emotionally. Perhaps one day that would change.
After all, she had not believed he could ever want her. But that had changed.
“It is not something I regret.”
“Are you sure?”
He didn’t bother to answer, simply renewed the kiss, his lips staking a claim that she knew he would be intent on keeping this time. His honor demanded it.
His hands traveled down her body, as if memorizing the dips and valleys that made up her figure. Then he was swinging her high against his chest and carrying her down the hall toward his bedroom.
Only he did not stop at his bedroom door, but carried on to the oversized balcony at the back of his apartment. He had removed all of the wall except the support beams that separated the back bedroom from the balcony, and created an extra-large outdoor living space right in downtown Athens. He’d even installed a small spa in one corner.
He didn’t take her to the spa, though. He took her to the double lounger that she’d shared with him many times—only in a very different capacity. It was designed to lift at opposite sides, so they could face each other in a lounging position, which they’d done many times in the past while sharing a rousing game of cards.
But right now it was completely flat, making it the size of an oval-shaped double bed. He laid her onto the cushions. They were covered in a polished cotton upholstery of such a fine weave that it felt like silk against her heated skin.
“You look so perfect there.” He stepped back and began to undress. “I cannot believe you doubt the chemistry between us. I have wanted you for a long time, pethi mou.”
“You hid it from me.”
“Too well, apparently.”
“So fix my misconceptions now…”
CHAPTER SEVEN
BUT he’d already fixed one. Phoebe didn’t have to be intimately acquainted with male anatomy to see that he was aroused.
Especially when he unzipped his pants.
Nervous, but determined to match him, she reached for the hem of her top.
“Stop,” he ordered.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to.”
“But…”
“I will undress you for this first time. It is both my right and my privilege.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know why it mattered to him, but the concept made her feel cherished, and lent an air of specialness to what they were doing. She wasn’t about to argue with that.
This was a special moment. Not only because it was her first time, but because she was finally making love with the man she had been in love with for years.
Letting her hands fall to her sides, she watched him finish undressing. She had seen him in swim trunks before, so his perfectly sculpted muscles were no surprise, nor was the golden tone of his skin, or the curly black hair on his chest, thinning as it traveled down his stomach.
But seeing those things in this situation had a profound impact on her. Heat suffused her body, while she felt a tremble work its way from her core outward.
“You are incredibly beautiful,” she whispered,
He stopped in the act of pulling off his silk boxers and stared at her, nonplussed. “Men are not beautiful, pethi mou.”
“You are.”
He laughed a little, shook his head, and then laughed again. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
“I am glad to hear my body pleases you.”
“It always has.”
He nodded and pushed the boxers off, allowing that part of him that made him so intensely masculine to surge upward. It was big, and pulsing
ly alive. A darker color than the rest of his skin, his sex stood out proudly from his body in testament to the desire he claimed to have for her.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“My friends at university told me that the pictures of men in magazines were not representative. That the average man was not nearly so…um…happily blessed in his nether regions.”
Spiros shrugged. “This is true. Are you disappointed?”
“No…I…um…I…don’t think you are the average man.”
Once again he laughed, but this time more fully. “I do not measure myself against other men.”
“Liar.”
He winked. “Perhaps once or twice I have eyed the competition, but a man must learn how to make love to a woman, not merely have the tool to do so. It matters not how one measures in comparison without that.”
“Even if that measurement is very impressive?”
“Be careful, or you will make me blush.”
“Maybe I’d like to see that.”
“I think you would rather feel right now, byba. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know…would I?”
He came down on the double lounger, his hot body above hers. “Trust me, you would.”
“I do trust you, Spiros. More than anyone or anything.”
“I am glad to hear it, Phoebe.” He leaned down and kissed her again, then started divesting her of her clothing. “Let’s get rid of these, shall we?”
“If you insist,” she tried to joke, but her voice came out too breathy, and just a little high.
“Oh, I do.” His voice was sultry, and sensual as sin. Wow. Just wow. And maybe darn.
His fingertips traced her skin as he removed her clothing, sending shivers throughout her body as he removed one article of clothing after another. She’d expected him to spend extra time on commonly accepted erogenous zones, was even preparing herself for it. What she was not prepared for was the way he found nerve-rich centers in the most unexpected locations and spent time with his hands and mouth playing to her sensitivity.
Places like the arch of her foot. And just behind her knee. And the small of her back. The nape of her neck. And the underside of her chin. Yes, her nipples were responsive, achingly so, but by the time he got to them she was so aroused she cried out in pleasure as his mouth closed over one hardened bud. When he sucked, she bowed up off the lounger, feeling the cataclysm she had felt once before at his touch building inside her again. And he brought her to it without giving her a chance to catch her breath or touch him or anything. Building, building, building, until her whole body went rigid and then convulsed in ecstasy.